(The Best Years in Life) There are so many unfortunate things that can happen during a hospital stay, accidental death being chief among them. It's bad enough that you have some condition that's sending you to the hospital in the first place, but piled on top of that, if you follow this blog, you know that medical error ranks third as a cause of mortality in the US -- which makes any hospital stay doubly frightening. A 2010 report revealed that one out of every seven patients admitted to a hospital in the US suffers harm at the hands of the medical staff. As if that's not enough to worry about, a recent study reveals yet another frightening possibility: that a hospital stay might incur significant cognitive decline -- merely because you were in the hospital.1